In September, it was announced that the coalition Government would legislate for same-sex marriages by 2015. A public consultation on how to make civil marriage available to same-sex couples is to be launched next month. Grassroots organisation Coalition for Marriage is today launching a campaign against the moves, in a bid to halt attempts to redefine marriage. The proposals were announced by the Lib Dem Equalities Minister Lynne Featherstone last year, but senior Tories made clear they had the strong backing of David Cameron - despite the likely opposition of many Conservative traditionalists.

Lord Carey wrote that he was “baffled” by David Cameron's statement at last year's Conservative party conference, in which the Prime Minister said: “I don’t support gay marriage in spite of being a Conservative. I support gay marriage because I am a Conservative.” In his article, Lord Carey said: “Like many others, I was baffled by this statement. Not because I begrudge rights and benefits to homosexual couples.” He said he was baffled “because this Government’s proposal constitutes one of the greatest political power grabs in history.”

He went on: “The state does not ‘own’ the institution of marriage. Nor does the church. The honourable estate of matrimony precedes both the state and the church, and neither of these institutions have the right to redefine it in such a fundamental way.”

Gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell said: “The Coalition for Marriage is intolerant and out of touch. Its support for the ban on gay marriage is homophobic and discrimination. Coalition members are entitled to believe that same-sex marriages are wrong, but they are not entitled to demand that their opposition to such marriages should be imposed on the rest of society and enforced by law.”

Mrs May also said students from low risk countries had been allowed to enter Britain even when they did not have visa clearance. She said the practice was unlawful and discriminatory. John Vine, the independent chief inspector of the UK Border Agency, launched an investigation after it emerged the UK's border checks were being relaxed at ports and airports without ministerial approval. His report found that border staff went "over and beyond" any scheme approved by ministers.

It also discovered that the biometric chip reading facility had been deactivated on 14,812 occasions at a number of ports between January and June 2011. Secure ID checks were also suspended a total of 482 times between June 2010 and November 2011, including 463 times at Heathrow alone, and most of these were between one and four hours.

Mrs May said: "The Vine report reveals a Border Force that suspended important checks without permission; that spent millions on new technologies but chose not to use them; that was led by managers who did not communicate with their staff; and that sent reports to ministers that were inaccurate, unbalanced and excluded key information. Suspensions were completely unauthorised and that was simply not acceptable," added the home secretary.

In parts of south-east England groundwater levels are lower than in the infamously dry summer of 1976. Water companies are ready to bring in hosepipe bans from early spring, where necessary, Defra says. The firms have agreed measures to reduce the environmental impact of dry conditions, including reducing water losses and improving leak detection, as well as encouraging customers to save water.

The Environment Agency will also take steps such as monitoring the impact of the dry weather on fisheries and wildlife. Ms Spelman said after the summit: "Drought is already an issue this year with the South East, Anglia and other parts of the UK now officially in drought, and more areas are likely to be affected as we continue to experience a prolonged period of very low rainfall."

Expanding the amount of money in circulation is, of course, beneficial in the short run because it stimulates business activity and takes some of the pressure off overextended borrowers and banks. But easy money also encourages risk-taking and temporarily pushes the prices of safe investments up to unsustainable levels, thereby creating the potential for future financial crises.

This problem last occurred – with catastrophic results – in the years following the 2000 technology stock crash, when Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan repeatedly stoked the money supply. That did help revive the US economy, but it also fueled a bubble in home prices that contributed greatly to the 2008 banking crisis. Moreover, Fed officials seemingly failed to recognize this side effect as it was happening.

Around the time the housing bubble peaked in 2006, Fed Vice Chairman Timothy Geithner (now the Secretary of the Treasury) summed up the official outlook: “This, on balance, still leaves us with what looks like a relatively balanced set of risks around what is still a quite favorable growth forecast.” In retrospect, that assessment was much too blithe. Indeed, in testimony before Congress in October 2008, Greenspan himself acknowledged that he had underestimated the risks of his policies.

Is current Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke making the same mistake – risking future bubbles because he is trying to compensate for a past one?

The broken shell of ChristChurch Cathedral, this South Island city's most famous landmark, stands deconsecrated and uncertain in a central square that grows bigger by the day, as demolition booms peck away at the surrounding buildings. In empty lots where buildings were bowled over, waist-high weeds grow from the cracks. Billboards are frozen in time, promoting events for March 2011.

So familiar have tremors become in Christchurch that locals are unnervingly good at instantly estimating the magnitude of an earthquake. They have had plenty of practice. Since the 7.1 quake in September 2010 – the first and biggest, which caused no fatalities in part thanks to its arrival in the middle of the night – geologists have measured more than 10,000 earthquakes in the region.

Of those, more than 400 have registered over magnitude 4.0; more than 40 have surpassed 5.0. A cluster of three earthquakes measuring up to 6.0 struck two days before Christmas, causing fresh damage to buildings, including the cathedral, and closing the airport. Days later, the state geological agency predicted that the area could expect aftershocks to continue for more than two decades, albeit with the likelihood of diminishing severity.

Leanne Curtis, spokeswoman for CanCern, a network of residents' groups, says people need to see firm timetables for the restoration of their homes and community facilities. "Without that you become a very depressed city," she says. "It's a very bad place for us to be mentally – you can't build, innovate, be entrepreneurial. You lose motivation, capacity to get up and help ourselves. You can't remake a city out of depression."

Communities in the east, and especially those which still await a government decision on whether their land is viable for rebuilding, are boiling over with frustration – with the insurance companies, with the authorities and with a sense of being overlooked, says Curtis.

The Texas congressman drew a couple thousand standing and chanting people to Kansas City's Union Station as the party's establishment dined on steak across the street at the Missouri GOP's annual conference. Kansas Republicans were holding a similar convention in a suburb across the state line.

Paul staged his rally near the nation's World War I museum, asserting that the US got off track about 100 years ago during the era of President Woodrow Wilson, who led the nation through World War I and unsuccessfully advocated for the nation's involvement in a forerunner of the United Nations.

"We've slipped away from a true Republic," Paul said. "Now we're slipping into a fascist system where it's a combination of government and big business and authoritarian rule and the suppression of the individual rights of each and every American citizen."

Unhappily, Tehran has ignored Mr Obama’s overtures. Not only is Iran thought to be within striking distance of how Israel defines its “zone of impunity” – the point at which Iranian nuclear weapons capability is irreversible – it has also threatened to block the Strait of Hormuz. Nothing spells global recession faster than $200-a-barrel oil prices. And nothing will bring a colder sweat to Mr Obama’s electoral strategists than the thought of conflict with Iran.

Yet that is what many in Washington are now calling a “probability”. Some White House officials have referred to 2012 as the “year of Iran”. It was supposed to be dominated by the US economy. Might it instead be the moment Mr Obama takes that 3am phone call? Many fear so. Some, including the New America Foundation’s Steve Clemons, talk about Mr Obama’s impending “Cuban missile crisis”. Much as Nikita Khrushchev misread John F Kennedy as a pushover, and then tested his brinkmanship over Cuba, so Mr Obama is perceived by Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, to be susceptible to intimidation.

Mr Netanyahu – Mr Obama’s least favourite foreign leader – visits Washington in two weeks. The build-up to his March 6 speech to the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee has brought a flurry of leaks that Israel’s fuse is shortening by the day. The zone of impunity is looming, people say. “Everything, from Iran’s nuclear timetable to Israel’s red lines, points to some kind of Iran reckoning before November,” says Mr Clemons. “It does not mean war necessarily, but the status quo cannot hold for long.”

Professor Peter Hawkey, a clinical microbiologist and chair of the Government's antibiotic-resistance working group, said that antibiotic resistance had become medicine's equivalent of climate change. The "slow but insidious growth" of resistant organisms was threatening to turn common infections into untreatable diseases, he said. Already, an estimated 25,000 people die each year in the European Union from antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections.

"It is a worldwide issue – there are no boundaries," he said. "We have very good policies on the use of antibiotics in man and in animals in the UK. But we are not alone. We have to think globally." Between 2005 and 2009 the incidence of E.coli "bacteraemias" [the presence of bacteria in the blood] rose by 30 per cent, from 18,000 to over 25,000 cases. Those resistant to antibiotics have risen from 1 per cent at the beginning of the century to 10 per cent.

"Only one in 20 of infections with [resistant] E.coli is a bacteraemia, so the above data are only the tip of an iceberg of infected individuals," says a report produced by Professor Hawkey's group, commissioned by the Department of Health and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

The NPD, anxious to ensure that no one says the wrong things, is putting a great deal of emphasis on self-control at the moment. Because of the NSU's alleged killing spree uncovered in November and the public debate over what should be done about the NPD, the party is faced, once again, with the prospect of a possible ban. This makes it all the more important for the NPD to project an image of itself as a well-behaved and rational mainstream conservative party. Hence its self-portrayal as a "party that cares" about people in Germany - provided they are ethnic Germans, of course.

In the past, the NPD used the term "National Socialism" as a provocation. But Apfel doesn't like the term anymore, characterizing it as being "burned by history." Instead, the party now prefers the slogan "respectable radicalism." It describes the attempt to camouflage (but not necessarily dispense with) the party's unpleasant associations, so that ordinary citizens can identify with it more closely. The party is putting on its mainstream façade for ordinary people by engaging in social grassroots activities, but always in the hope that the national awakening of its fellow Germans will eventually follow.

"Tutoring, children's sports, providing advice on Hartz IV (welfare benefits) - wherever we see an area where the government isn't doing enough, we move in," says Peter Marx. He speaks with the soft, singsong-like inflection of people native to the western state of Rhineland-Palatine, an accent he took with him when he moved to Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania a few years ago. Marx, the manager of the NPD's parliamentary group in the state, exploits the fact that the famous "blooming landscapes" that former Chancellor Helmut Kohl promised for eastern Germany never materialized in many places. If there were functioning civil-society structures in Western Pomeranian towns like Anklam or Ueckermünde, the right-wing extremists would be little more than an annoyance in the region. The fact that these structures are absent is what makes the party so dangerous.

Less than 72 hours after Christian Wulff announced his resignation as German president, Germany has found a successor. On Sunday evening, Germany's main political parties announced that they had agreed on a common candidate, Joachim Gauck. The former East German civil rights activist is now expected to be elected in a vote that is likely to be a mere formality.

Gauck's nomination came after a dramatic conflict between Merkel's conservatives and their junior coalition partner, the business-friendly Free Democratic Party (FDP). Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU) had originally opposed Gauck's candidacy, favoring former German Environment Minister Klaus Töpfer or the former head of the Protestant Church in Germany, Wolfgang Huber, instead.

The FDP leadership, however, announced on Sunday afternoon that it supported Gauck, the preferred candidate of the two main opposition parties, the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) and the Greens. The split between the two partners threatened to turn into a serious crisis within the coalition. Merkel, however, prevented further escalation by giving in to the FDP.

The other party leaders also had laudatory words for Gauck. SPD leader Sigmar Gabriel expressed the hope that Gauck could bridge the gulf between ordinary people and politicians, saying that Gauck was "not someone who gets involved in party squabbling." Green Party co-leader Claudia Roth described Gauck as a "moral authority" who would once again lend "respect and dignity" to the office of the president.

The European Union in January decided to stop importing crude from Iran from July 1 over its disputed nuclear program, which the West says is aimed at building bombs. Iran denies this. Iran's oil minister said on February 4 that the Islamic state would cut its oil exports to "some" European countries.

The European Commission said last week that the bloc would not be short of oil if Iran stopped crude exports, as they have enough in stock to meet their needs for around 120 days. Industry sources told Reuters on February 16 that Iran's top oil buyers in Europe were making substantial cuts in supply months in advance of European Union sanctions, reducing flows to the continent in March by more than a third - or over 300,000 barrels daily.

France's Total has already stopped buying Iran's crude, which is subject to fresh EU embargoes. Market sources said Royal Dutch Shell has scaled back sharply. Among European nations, debt-ridden Greece is most exposed to Iranian oil disruption. Motor Oil Hellas of Greece was thought to have cut out Iranian crude altogether and compatriot Hellenic Petroleum along with Spain's Cepsa and Repsol were curbing imports from Iran. Iran was supplying more than 700,000 barrels per day (bpd) to the EU plus Turkey in 2011, industry sources said.

After Saturday's lavish ceremony, the Roman Catholic Church will have a total of 213 cardinals - including 125 who are under the age of 80 and could therefore take part in the conclave which will meet to elect a new pope once Pope Benedict dies. The Pope, who will shortly celebrate his 85th birthday, is visibly slowing down, says the BBC's David Willey in Rome.

Media reports speak of cardinals and their supporters jockeying for prominence as the Pope's strength declines. Seven Italians - many of them holding influential positions inside Church government - are among the new cardinals, our correspondent says, increasing the possibility that the next Pope could once again be an Italian. That reflects what will be a strong European presence among the 125 "cardinal electors", despite the fact that the regions of growth for Roman Catholic congregations are Africa and Latin America rather than Europe.

The consistory is taking place against a background of disquiet inside the Vatican, our correspondent adds. Confidential internal memos alleging corruption among top clerics and some laymen who advise the Pope have been leaked to the media. The Vatican spokesman said - using a colourful metaphor - that "wolves were on the prowl in the frescoed palace of the popes".

The case, to begin at an industrial tribunal tomorrow, comes amid growing concern among Christians at the “marginalisation” of religion in public life, and days after the Queen spoke up for the value of faith and its vital place in British society, while Baroness Warsi, the Conservative party chairman, said a “liberal elite” was attempting to downgrade the importance of religion in public life.

It involves a public sector employer at a time when Christian groups have expressed fears that state bodies - including the judiciary - are failing to treat them fairly. It will also will highlight long-running concern over the status of Sunday as a day of rest, which the Church has warned is being downgraded.

The Employment Equality (Religion or Belief) Regulations, published in 2003, say employers must justify Sunday working as a “legitimate business need” and does not give a blanket right to Christians not to work. If they fail to treat staff fairly and proportionately, the employee may be able to claim discrimination, the rules add.

In the run-up to this Consistory it emerged that the Pope's current ambassador (nuncio) to the United States, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, had written to the Pope confidentially last March, alleging corruption, nepotism and cronyism inside the office where he worked. Nepotism is a word charged with heavy meaning inside the Vatican. For centuries popes were accustomed to appoint their own nephews as cardinals, sometimes when they were only in their teens.

Archbishop Vigano's letter was leaked by an Italian investigative journalist during a TV transmission on the independent Italian Channel La Sette. The Vatican has not contested that the letter is genuine. Another leak concerns attempts by the Holy See to combat suspicions of money-laundering by the Vatican Bank.

Published by the Italian newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano, which has consistently reported on alleged suspicious transactions at the bank, the document bears the signature of Cardinal Attilio Nicora. He heads a new internal committee tasked by the Pope with helping the Holy See comply with international banking regulations, aimed at combating international financial crime. The letter suggests serious divisions of opinion inside the Vatican over how best to prevent it becoming a fiscal paradise, a tax haven for dodgy commercial operations run by nominees who have no right to hold accounts at the Institute for Works of Religion (IOR).

Money clearly preoccupies the men currently running the Catholic Church. While promising to "improve the administration of the goods and resources of the Holy See" the committee called upon the world's 1.3 billion Catholic faithful to dig deeper into their pockets to continue funding the Vatican.

The TUC has accused Gove of failing in his legal duties by insisting that equality laws, which prohibit discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation, do not extend to the school curriculum. The TUC complains that the current situation sends mixed signals to the playground, because schools are legally obliged to condemn discrimination on sexual-orientation grounds but are free to use religious materials that equality campaigners claim is homophobic.

Brendan Barber, the TUC's general secretary, wrote to Gove in December expressing alarm that a booklet containing "homophobic material" had been distributed by a US preacher after talks to pupils at Roman Catholic schools across the Lancashire region in 2010. The booklet, "Pure Manhood: How to become the man God wants you to be", discusses a boy dealing with "homosexual attractions" which it suggested may "stem from an unhealthy relationship with his father, an inability to relate to other guys, or even sexual abuse".

The booklet, which claims that "scientifically speaking, safe sex is a joke", explains that "the homosexual act is disordered, much like contraceptive sex between heterosexuals. Both acts are directed against God's natural purpose for sex – babies and bonding." Referring to the Equality Act 2010, which prohibits discrimination against individuals, Barber said: "Schools now have a legal duty to challenge all forms of prejudice. Such literature undermines this completely."

A DfE spokesman insisted: "Any school engaging in the promotion of homophobic material would be acting unlawfully." But the row highlights a grey area over the teaching of sex education. A review intended to provide new guidelines on what was appropriate for schools to teach was kicked into the long grass when the last election was called. "It would certainly be helpful if there was clarity as to what is appropriate for young people of all ages," said Ben Summerskill, chief executive of the gay rights group Stonewall. "The water could no longer be muddied by people pushing age-inappropriate sex material on the one hand and fundamentalist anti-gay religious materials on the other."

The row comes at the end of an extraordinary week in which the role of religion in society has come under acute scrutiny.